The Best App For Crafting Ideas, Paper, Just Got Even Better

Most people know “Paper by FiftyThree” as the beautiful drawing app that won an Apple Design Award in 2012 for its clean yet purposeful layout.

Paper has been focused on creation side of things for a while, even introducing their own ‘Pencil’ stylus for iPads.

Today, Paper 2.0 will introduce the new ‘Mix’ ecosystem, an extension to Paper that is all about finding inspiration from collaboration.

“It really feels like we’re launching FiftyThree,” CEO and cofounder Georg Petschnigg told Business Insider. “We created FiftyThree to build essential tools for mobile creation. Paper was all about creating ideas and bringing them out. Pencil was all about creating. The last part of the creative process is sharing and creating with others.”

At its heart, Mix is a major update that expands Paper outwards and into a collaborative creative commons space.

“Mix is an online service, where people can post their ideas and sketches,” said Petschnigg. “People can follow ideas and creatives, and they can go there to remix people’s work.”

When you browse Mix, you’re greeted with ideas, sketches, illustrations, and artwork that is free to build upon, remix, or enhance.

“People graduate from high school, and they feel like they’re not creative, that they don’t know how to draw,” Petschnigg said. “But they’re told not to look at their neighbour’s work; it’s a world in which you’re told you’re not creative and the world only recognises creative genius.”

To access the Mix ecosystem from within Paper, users will simply look above their journal collections.

“Above the journals, we’ve added a layer of open stacks of pages,” Petschnigg said. “There’s three of them: a stream of things you’ve created, a stream of people you follow, and and a stream of creations you’ve started.”

While anything within the Mix ecosystem is fair game to use, you’ll still be able to see the origin of a work’s inspiration, as FiftyThree tracks the root of any idea.

If you don’t get an invitation immediately, you might have to wait a little longer. FiftyThree is rolling out the update to thousands of people every week, and Mix will be available to everyone by the end of October.

In the meantime, you can watch the official Mix launch video to get a sense of some of the collaboration that’s possible with Paper’s biggest update.

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